RAID as most might not be aware is an abbreviation of Redundant Array of Independent Disks. It is offered as an add-on service to the dedicated hosting packages by eUKhost. Raid is a configuration of two or more hard disks together used for a specific purpose such as back-ups, optimum performance or sometimes depending on the client requirements for both. With the technological advancements till date, most of the motherboards today are compatible with some kind of RAID configuration (often Raid 1 and Raid 0). While few high configuration motherboards are compatible to RAID 3 and RAID 0+1. Though the performance of the onboard RAID controllers are yet to attain the level of PCI cards. Incases where users have an essential RAID requirement, can choose motherboards with Nvidia chipsets.

With an effort to improve stability and fault tolerence, manufacturers came up with RAID servers.Today, there are ten configurations that are offered by various website hosting companies offering dedicated hosting services. In this article we have explained the various configurations of RAID.

Classification of RAID :

RAID 0 : This RAID type is opted by individuals who have a requirement for speed, as RAID 0 is reputed to provide an enhanced performance of the machine. The controller takes care of spliting the data evenly across the disks. Therefore, 2 hard drives in the RAID 0 have a gain of 100% on a usual hard disk whereas shows an effective gain of 30%. Striping mode it handles all the HD’s that way as a single HD, adding the capacity of all volumes and treating as a single disk.

RAID 1 : RAID 1 is well known amongst webmasters due to its feature of Mirroring.This unique feature is used for data back-ups. RAID 1 creates a mirror of the content present on the primary disks in real time. Hence, even if your primary hard drive encounters any problem and fails to respond, you do not lose any data. Inorder to have this type of RAID attached to your dedicated hosting server, you need to have two hard drives with identical configurations.

RAID 2 : RAID 2 is no longer used. Previously, it was used for embedding the error correction codes in every cluster of the recorded data. But now-a-days, the hard drives themselves are pre-equipped with error correction mechanism, hence this type of RAID has been extinct.

RAID 3 : RAID 3 has been considered to be a complex system that also needs large capital for its maintainence. It needs four hard drives. In this, 3 hard drives operate alike RAID 0, where every information is split across all the 3 drives acting as a single drive. Now here, in this type of RAID, the 4th harddisk functions as the recovery disk. It saves the data over the first three disks, if any of them malfunctions or fails to respond, you still have the option to recover the data using Drive Four. This kind of RAID option is suitable for large organisations since the cost can be affordable. RAID 3 offers dual benefits to users, one is high performance and the other is fault tolerance.

RAID 4 : RAID 4 shares similarity with RAID 3, but with a basic difference in the process of recording data. RAID 3 splits the data into small blocks and spreads it across the hard drives,RAID 4 saves the content in larger blocks. Splitting the data into larger blocks enable you to achieve greater speed (read and write), this inturn helps in accessing the data present on the hard drives faster and on a wider scale as well.

RAID 5 : The core purpose of this RAID type is similar to that of RAID 3. It too takes care of striping and fault tolerance but in a different manner. In this type of RAID the system distribute data across every hard-drive instead of having a single disk allocated for recovery of data. In this there is no need to have a dedicated drive since you have the data on all the disk-drives. If any of the disks fails to function, using the remaining functional disks you can recover the data on that disk. This RAID type offers robustness along with enhanced flexibility.

RAID 6 : RAID 6 is basically an arrangement with an intention to increase data protection of arrays with volume data spread across multiple disk drives. It enhances protection of data by adding an additional layer of equality over RAID5 deployment.With this kind of protection, this RAID type has the ability for data restoration from an array with upto two malfunctioning disks. RAID 6 is appropriate storing archive class distributed data management’s (DMM’s). In order to understand RAID 6, it is important to understand RAID 5 first.

RAID 10: Mirroring and striping without parity.

RAID 10 encompasses multiple sets of mirrored-drives. The mirrored drives are further striped all-together for creating a final virtual-drive. Hence, resulting in an extremely scalable mirror array which holds the capability to perform reads and writes considerably faster. The two array types provides an excellent performance as a whole due to the combination of the speed of RAID 0 alongwith the redundancy of RAID 1 without the necessity of parity calculations.

Following is the Tabular Classification of RAID :

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